06/26/2004
As early as mid-August, munitions handlers hope to go to one of the 80-foot-long
concrete bunkers in K Block of the Umatilla Chemical Depot, fire up a forklift,
and move to the door two pallets stacked with a total of 30 M55 rockets filled
with deadly nerve agent. Outside the bunker, another forklift will load the rockets into a 19,000-pound
pressurized containment cylinder on a flatbed truck, which will drive down
a short road to a huge building inside the U.S. Army's Umatilla Chemical
Agent Disposal Facility. The rockets will be the first of more than 220,000 munitions containing
nerve and mustard agents left over from the Cold War to move through the robotic
disassembly line, where they will be punched, drained, chopped and finally
burned in special furnaces, disposing of a threat that has sat in the rolling
sagebrush of the Columbia Plateau for more than 60 years. "It's time," said Frank Harkenrider, who as mayor of Hermiston from 1990
to 2000 took part in many of the battles fought over the past decade to get
to this point. "It's time to say yes to the incinerator." The last remaining yes needed to fire up the furnaces with real nerve and
mustard agents is expected to come Aug. 13, when the Oregon Environmental
Quality Commission considers the results of three years of testing. Destroying the munitions and shutting down the Umatilla plant is expected
to take the next six years — three years past the initial deadline set by
international treaty — and cost a total of $24 billion. Still, not everyone is eager to get on with it. Karyn Jones, who manages
her father's dental office here and grew up downwind of radiation from the
Hanford nuclear reservation, has fought the incinerator every step of the
way. She and the grassroots organization GASP still have three lawsuits pending,
hoping to force the U.S. Army to start over with a chemical neutralization
process. "It's a disaster waiting to happen," Jones said. The first of the chemical weapons arrived on five rail cars in August 1962,
just two months before the Cuban missile crisis, when the Cold War conflict
between the Soviet Union and the United States almost went hot after President
John F. Kennedy refused to let the Soviet Union put nuclear missiles on Cuba.
A total of 7,300 tons of deadly nerve and mustard agents contained in
missiles, artillery rounds, bombs, land mines, sprayers and storage containers
came to be stored here in row upon row of concrete bunkers originally built
for World War II bombs and ammunition. About 140 have leaked since 1984, increasing
pressure to destroy them. President Nixon halted the manufacture of chemical weapons in 1969, and
the Army has budgeted $25 billion to destroy the 31,000-ton national stockpile.
To date, more than 9,000 tons have been destroyed. The Army decided in the 1980s to build incinerators at the eight storage
sites around the country and one on Johnston Atoll, south of Hawaii. Johnston
Atoll has finished incinerating its stockpile. As technology improved and
local opposition to incinerators increased, the Army agreed to switch to
chemical neutralization at four sites — Newport, Ind.; Blue Grass, Ky.; Edgewood,
Del.; and Pueblo, Colo. Sites in Tooele, Utah; Pine Bluff, Ark.; Anniston,
Ala. and Umatilla are going ahead with incineration. Neutralization is not without its problems. Disputes remain over how to
dispose of millions of gallons of contaminated wastewater generated by the
process. Construction and testing of the Umatilla incinerator had problems, too.
Construction workers claiming they were exposed to nerve agent while building
the plant in 1999 have won the first round of their lawsuit against the Army.
A federal judge ruled the government was negligent in providing emergency
response when the workers became mysteriously ill. The Army and Washington Demilitarization Co., which built and operates
the incinerator, were fined $185,000 for bypassing safety systems during furnace
testing last year. Another $11,000 in fines were levied after an employee
left the grounds with a diluted vial of the nerve agent sarin in his pocket.
There are four incinerators. Two burn the liquid agent at 2,700 degrees.
A deactivation furnace destroys explosives and rocket motors. A metal parts
furnace burns off traces of agent from remaining hardware. Exhaust gasses
go through an afterburner, then a system of scrubbers and filters before being
released into the air. In the control room, supervisor Lance Pappas can watch over the weapons
from bunker to furnace. He feels safe for himself, as well as his family in
Kennewick, Wash., 35 miles away. "I worked in refineries, and refineries are a whole lot more dangerous
than this is," Pappas said. Pappas and everyone else must carry a gas mask and special syringes loaded
with antidote in case of a spill. Orange wind socks around the compound show
which way the wind is blowing in case gas is released. Weather conditions
are constantly monitored to project where a leak may spread. Reader boards
on nearby Interstate 84 are ready to warn of an emergency. The containment rooms where the munitions are dismantled, drained and
fed into incinerators have walls 30 inches thick in case of an explosion.
Sensors and alarms around the plant can detect minute amounts of agent. In
case of a spill, workers don protective suits to clean it up. Video monitors
keep watch over the plant and grounds. Guards tightly control people entering
and leaving. Like the midst of the Cold War, when students around the nation practiced
hiding under their desks in case of nuclear attack, the 10,000 students in
28 nearby schools practice assembling in special rooms pressurized to keep
out drifting gas in case of a release. Reports from trial burns on the metal parts incinerator — using simulated
chemical agents inside the incinerator instead of real ones — have yet to
be approved. And the facility for processing wastewater from the pollution
control system still must be tested. But Dennis Murphey, who oversees the incinerator for the Oregon Department
of Environmental Quality, does not foresee anything that would delay the process.
In the little town of Irrigon, just a few miles downwind of the depot,
retiree George Horace is not looking forward to the day the furnaces fire
up. His father breathed mustard gas in World War I and eventually died of
it. "Anybody who gets a whiff of that is dead," Horace said. "If they want
to get rid of it, they ought to ship it back to Washington, D.C. They're the
only ones making any money off of it." But Jack Baker, owner of Bake's Restaurant and Lounge, agrees with former
mayor Harkenrider. "I think it's great it's starting," he said. "The quicker they get rid
of it, the safer we will be."